You force people to stop asking questions, and before you know it they have auctioned off the question mark, or sold it for scrap. No boldness. No good ideas for fixing what’s broken in the land. Because if you happen to mention it’s broken, you are automatically disqualified.
This manuscript of yours that has just come back from another editor is a precious package. Don’t consider it rejected. Consider that you’ve addressed it ‘to the editor who can appreciate my work’ and it has simply come back stamped ‘Not at this address’. Just keep looking for the right address.
To people who think of themselves as God’s houseguests, American enterprise must seem arrogant beyond belief. Or stupid. A nation of amnesiacs, proceeding as if there were no other day but today. Assuming the land could also forget what had been done to it.
The most important part of a story is the piece of it you don’t know.
Insomnia’s different,” I said. It was hard to explain this to people. “You know the light that comes on when you open the refrigerator door? Just imagine it stays on all the time, even after you close the door. That’s what it’s like in my head. The light stays on.
Hallie and I... were all there was. The image in the mirror that proves you are still here. We had exactly one sister apiece. We grew up knowing the simple arithmetic of scarcity: A sister is more precious than an eye.
Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work – that goes on, and it adds up. It goes into the ground, into crops, into children’s bellies and their bright eyes. Good things don’t get lost.
It lasted just a moment, whatever that is. One held breath? An ant’s afternoon? It was brief, I can promise that much, for although it’s been many years now since my children ruled my life, a mother recalls the measure of the silences.
Imagine a ruin so strange it must never have happened.
The obstinate practicality of old women pierces and fortifies these families like the steel rods buried in walls of powdery concrete.
This household is like a pocketful of coins that jingled together for a time, but now have been slapped on a counter to pay a price. The pocket empties out, the coins venture back into the infinite circulation of currency, separate, invisible, and untraceable.
I never put real people into my fiction – I can’t see the slightest point of that, when I have the alternative of inventing utterly subservient slave-people, whose every detail of appearance and behavior I can bend to serve my theme and plot.
Most of us are creatures so comforted by habit, it can take something on the order of religion to invoke new, more conscious behaviors – however glad we may be afterward that we went to the trouble.
He doesn’t even look at her because there is too much there, and he’s afraid. She is his first child, his favorite, every mistake he ever made.
It was a true conversation. About whether our ancestors had more important lives than we do. And how they’ve managed to trick us, if they did not.
Modern people are just like ancient ones, only more numerous.
Soon the maroon-throated howls would echo back from the other trees, father down the beach, until the whole jungle filled with roaring trees. As it was in the beginning, so it is every morning of the world.
Nobody had planted these flowers, I felt sure, nor harvested them either; these were works that the Lord had gone ahead and finished on His own. He must have lacked faith in mankind’s follow-through capabilities, on the day he created flowers.
I keep hoping some guy with ‘Ron’ or ‘Andy’ stitched on his pocket and a gas pump in his hand will step up and tell me where I’m headed.
The radio is at the root of the evil, their rule is: No silence, ever. When anything happens, the commentator has to speak without a moment’s pause for gathering wisdom. Falsehood and inanity are preferable to silence.